Leigh Palmer

My paintings are based on observation of the landscape in the Hudson River Valley where I live, and are improvised in the studio; the images are found or discovered in my memory of familiar places and developed during the painting process. Human beings do not appear, but their presence is felt in the marks left on the ground (furrows, fence rows, roads), and sometimes in the air (smoke, haze).

The Hudson River School weighs heavily on the landscape painter here, and the influence must be grappled with. I cautiously take energy from the tradition, but I choose humble locations and treat them more introspectively than most of those 19th century painters did.

The window has returned to my paintings after a long furlough. Now it is in the form of a frame or a mat which may also be read as an opening in a wall. Recently, I have been using metal leaf around the edges which creates a kind of frame while remaining an integral formal element of the painting.

I use beeswax (encaustic) paint because, in its unruliness, it encourages the accidental. It is almost impossible for me to use it to render, and I get an expressive, rough, sometimes dream-like product: I surprise myself. The surface can be scraped and sculpted, worked as one might work the ground with a hoe or rake.

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“Leigh Palmer spent most of his early painting life working in oils”, writes Randi Hoffman of American Artist. He depicted serene interiors, views through windows, and landscapes in a precise, detailed western"> Around this time, the artist received a set of materials for encaustic painting from a friend and began to experiment with them. Encaustic is a technique of painting with hot wax colors that fuse to a support after they are applied and fixed with heat. “The process suggests a distinct language of marks. It requires a different painting vocabulary,” says Palmer. “And it’s very permanent, which I like. Also, it hardens in about twenty seconds or so, while oils dry slowly and often don’t appear the way they did when you put them on. With encaustic paints, I can see how my work looks immediately.”

About the same time he began using encaustic, Palmer also started to move away from painting from photographs. “I began to work more spontaneously, making the picture up as I went along,” he says. “Instead of a preconceived idea, I allowed my emotions to come into play. I began working from a place where dreams were taking an inventory of what was inside me.” He notes that encaustic became a catalyst for this change. “The medium doesn’t always go the way you want it to; you have to follow it,” says Palmer. “I think encaustic provided me with the ability to have accidental things happen as I went along. I had to give up the control I had with oil paint. I’ve ended up doing more interpretive paintings.”

Established in 1991, Carrie Haddad Gallery represents mid-career and emerging artists of the Hudson Valley and beyond working in painting, sculpture, mixed media and photography. We organize 7 group exhibits per year in a 3000 square foot gallery space on Hudson's Warren Street.